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Comment by gitah | Hacker News Reader

Can you elaborate?

From the article, Pettis assumes the following is true:

  1) China has overinvested in infrastructure and manufacturing capacity to such an extent 
  that in the aggregate the cost of additional 
  public sector investment exceeds the present 
  value of future increases in productivity generated by 
  the investment

and

  2) China's long-term sustainable growth rate is substantially below the economy's current GDP growth target

Why does he make these assumptions without also analyzing the technology improvement aspect? I don't see anything about that in this article.

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He elaborates on technology improvement in other articles, but it boils down to: technological improvements have a range of returns, but even the most optimistic of historical returns to technological progress can't paper over the debt-fueled boom China is currently undergoing.

Basically, qualitatively, you're right. Technological improvements can generate growth from scratch. But when you look at the historical data to try to quantify it, you see it's quite modest. Big gains have come from: women entering the workforce, electrification, containerization. The rest is incremental enough it doesn't matter in the same way.

(Part of this is how it's measured; the fact that consumers get much more value for their dollar isn't well captured, but the point remains because it's about debt-servicing, not consumer value.)

I don't get it. US workers still have 5x higher average income than China. Doesn't this suggest there are still a ton of technological improvement left to exploit? Why can't China just keep walking the same path of technological improvement as the US?

The average disguises a few things. One, I assume that's in absolute terms and not, say, purchasing power parity (which accounts for lower consumer prices in China).

Two, the 'average' in China includes huge numbers of the rural poor. They are living in the third world; an office worker in Shanghai is not, but her income's contribution to the average is diluted by rural subsistence farmers.

This does suggest that there is room for growth via urbanization and modernization: if subsistence farmers switched to commercial farming, and the excess labor moved to productive cities, in theory you've got a productivity boom. But China's productivity is predicated on the world's ability to absorb their excess production, which is not actually unlimited. That said, the central government is taking deliberate steps to encourage urbanization (while simultaneously not undertaking some reforms that would help, like overhauling the hukou system).

Containerization? That's really interesting. I knew it had a big effect on how shipping worked, but didn't realise it was as important driver of change to the world economy as electrification.

My Dad used to work as a merchant seaman, I believe he got up to first officer and had passed his captain's exam.

But then the big container ships came along, and they needed a tiny fraction of the captains, officers and seaman they needed previously per tonne and he ended up coming ashore to pursue a different career. His stories from those times are pretty amazing.

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